Meeting the Unique Individual: Theory & Practice of Benjamin Wolstein, Ph.D.

I knew the late Dr. Benjamin Wolstein as a teacher, supervisor, psychoanalyst, and as the extraordinary individual he was. This last characteristic, I believe, could only be experienced if you were brave enough to be a patient of this extraordinary analyst. As a psychoanalyst he devoted himself exclusively to his craft: studying human beings up close, writing about what he learned, and helping his patients overcome the psychological barriers to truly being themselves. Sitting with Dr. Wolstein is best described as sitting with someone who earnestly practiced the analysis of interpersonal and personal experience as it was happening in the room. His challenging interactions invited a patient to be honest, direct and vulnerable. Ben Wolstein truly enjoyed getting back the brand of honest interaction he without hesitation offered to his patients. I think he considered it a gift, an intimate opportunity to learn something new together with another person.

By all accounts, Ben Wolstein was a master psychoanalyst. He was a prolific writer and analyzed many prominent analysts in New York City. His particular practice of interpersonal psychoanalysis was deepened by his interest in psychological individuation as an essential experience in treatment. However, his writings were focused largely on developing a sound theoretical basis for a “psychological psychoanalysis” and integrating it with Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal psychiatric perspective. What was missing in his writings was an explication and illustration of how he actually worked in his day-to-day practice. As a former patient, I recall Ben practicing a highly interactive psychoanalysis analyzing what he called interpersonal and intrapersonal “barriers” to the emergence of a person’s unique individuality to direct experience and expression.

I believe it is vitally important to acknowledge and develop the possibility of psychological individuation as a healing experience in psychotherapy. I remember Ben talking about how he believed relational psychotherapy without the counterbalancing influences of psychological individuation was, as he put it, “devoid of a center.” He wrote about this back in the 1970’s (Wolstein 1971) but never really clarified the clinical application of this important healing experience.

Psychological individuality was defined by Ben Wolstein as the indivisible wholeness of a person’s unique original self that does not originate in the internalized influences of other people or outside experiences, but emerges solely from the inside of a person over time if the conditions for its emergence are present in an emotionally intimate relationship. Our unique individuality is always somewhere on the inside awaiting an emergence to consciousness. This is the true essence of an individual human being that is dormant and only comes to life in an emotionally intimate relationship.

Of course, so much of life experience starting from birth is antagonistic to unique individuality, that this essence of original self often remains in the shadows protected but unconscious, unexperienced, and unexpressed. Ben believed that a psychotherapeutic relationship, if it offered a genuine opportunity to be free, along with the interpersonal conditions of equality and honesty, would be the place where a person takes the risk to directly experience their true original self in the presence of another person.

Many of my patients, who have not had the opportunity to experience such a freedom earlier in life, correct this loss by learning how to overcome the barriers to this emergence of individuality, now in middle age. As a result of my own clinical interest in the application of psychological individuation as a therapeutic experience, I wrote Individuation in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Emergence of Individuality in Interpersonal & Relational Theory & Practice, published with C.C. Thomas in 1999. My focus was on developing a clinical understanding of psychological individuation in psychotherapy as influenced by working with Wolstein. My clinical research on the healing potential of psychological individuation is still evolving.

Psychological individuation, defined as the emergence of unique individuality in the psychotherapeutic relationship, is an essential addition to a clinical practice. I believe it is also  esssential in the training of effective psychotherapists. So far our emphasis has been on influencing our patient’s personality functioning by changing unhealthy internalized interpersonal influences, without the accompanying emphasis on inviting to consciousness the unique individuality of the person. The most effective way of inducing our patients to drop the unhealthy things they’ve learned about life from other people, is to invite them to directly experience their own individual uniqueness.

Dr. Thomas Jordan

A few selected Wolstein references:

Wolstein, Benjamin,  Freedom to Experience: A Study of Psychological Change from a Psychoanalytic Point of View, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1964.

Wolstein, Benjamin,  Human Psyche in Psychoanalysis, Illinois: C.C. Thomas, 1971.

Wolstein, Benjamin (1971).  Interpersonal Relations Without Individuality. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 8: 75-80.

Wolstein, Benjamin (1974).  Individuality and Identity. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 10: 1-14.

Wolstein, Benjamin (1975).  Toward a Conception of Unique Individuality. Contemporary Psychoanalysis. 11: 146-160

Wolstein, Benjamin (1987). Anxiety and the Psychic Center of the Psychoanalytic Self. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 23: 631-65

Wolstein, Benjamin (1994). The Evolving Newness of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: From the Vantage Point of Immediate Experience. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 30: 473-499.